Krishnan Viswanath

The 5.0 release of JDK introduced a slew of new features. A powerful technique that resulted from the JSR-175 recommendation is the Program Annotation Facility. It can annotate code in a standard way and automate the generation of source code or configuration files, helping cut down on boilerplate code. At the moment, the closest thing to annotating source and generating support file/code is through java doc tags. The popular ones are @deprecated, @author, @param etc. However, these tags are pretty static by nature and the information they define isn't encoded in the class file by the compiler so it's not available at runtime. A popular implementation of this concept is XDoclet. This is an Open Source utility that lets a developer add metadata or attributes to source as java doc tags. Appropriate source files or configurations, such as deployment descriptors, are g... (more)

Java New Input/Output

Input/Output (I/O) is one of the fundamental aspects of computing that you have to deal with at some point during the application's development phase. Dealing with I/O presents its own challenges because I/O access is still slow. For example, reading or writing data from or to a disk involves a choreography of electronic, mechanical, and computer engineering disciplines, making the task slow in comparison to, say, reading or writing from random access memory over a high-speed bus. To minimize the impact of working with slow I/O mediums and to maximize throughput and performance,... (more)